January 6, 2017

What Turkey has become

As I sat down to write this article, my wife turned to me from her computer and said that there was a terrorist bombing in Izmir.

Almost every week lately, there is another incident that can be tied to ISIS whether or not it actually takes “credit”. On New Year’s Eve, we were at her brother-in-law Mehmet’s apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan sitting down for dinner with Prosecco, the poor man’s Champagne, when the news broke about the terrorist attack on the Reina nightclub in the Beşiktaş district of Istanbul. When I first met Mehmet on a visit to Istanbul in 2003, he anticipated that this sort of thing would eventually begin to take place in Turkey. He thought that the war in Iraq could spill over into Turkey and that it would be best for his family to relocate to the USA. This is pretty much what has happened.

ISIS is a product of the invasion of Iraq, a war that Turkey opposed and whose decision was welcomed by the left. While most people might remember the AKP as key to voting down a resolution that would have permitted Turkey to be a staging ground for the invasion, the truth is that its opposition was based more on cash than principle. Like a mafia gang, it offered the USA a deal. A fifty-two-billion-dollar aid package would buy Turkey’s backing but when Bush refused to pay more than half of that, the AKP nixed the deal.

In fact, the baksheesh economy prevailed in Syria as well, the “anti-imperialist” country often depicted as the polar opposite of NATO member Turkey. Clifford Krause reported in the NY Times on January 2nd, 2003 that the Bush administration was “surprised and gratified by Syria’s recent vote in the United Nations Security Council in favor of the resolution demanding Iraq allow weapons inspectors to return or face possible military action.”

ISIS is not a product of US invasion of Iraq. Iraq was invaded because Israel and the neoconservative decided that after failing to destroy Islamic regime in Tehran – he might turned his guns toward Israel.

In October 2016, Iraqi security forces burned a 16 thousands square meter of field planted with opium poppies by ISIS gangs near Sharqat district in Salahuddin province.

ISIS which was created by the Zionist regime in 1990 (watch video below) is the main customer of ISIS opium poppy.

According to Iraqi media sources, the US-Saudi Arabia-Israel-Turkey funded and protected terrorist group extracts heroin from the crops in laboratories of Mosul University which has been under ISIS control since the middle of 2014.

The media has also claimed that the poppy cultivation is supervised by Afghan nationals who worked at the US-NATO poppy fields in Afghanistan….

Rehmat, no offense, but I think you have a mental illness. You asked us to watch a video that supposedly proves that Israel created ISIS but the letters are not for the Islamic State but Israel Secret Intelligence Service. You need help. Maybe Thorazine. I don’t know but please don’t come here again. I really have enough to deal with when it comes to ultraleft trolls who think they are Trotsky in Coyoacan without having to deal with someone who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte.

Louisproyect, no offense, but I think you’re suffering from Jewish disease known as ‘Self-denial’.

A 2010 study conducted by Professor Daniel Bar-Tal (Tel Aviv University) have found out that an average Israeli Jew prefer to live in ‘self-denial’ as he/she is not interested to know the facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict. They’re brainwashed with Zionist narrative of the conflict and hatred toward Arabs and Muslims from an early age…..

Ok let me get this out of the way first. I came to this thread only because when I clicked on the catagory Turkey this is the first thing that came up. I have been really wanting to make some comments on the situation between Turkey on one side and Germany and the the Netherlands on the other side. Yet the subject has not come up on any of the three sites that I check hourly.
In the dispute that I just refered to the Turks are clearly in the right. It was totally wrong for people in Germany and the Netherlands to sabotage campaign appearences by the Turkish government officials because they did not like what the Turks were saying. A major point of the enlightment was that I may not agree with what your are saying but I will defend to the death your right to say it. OK the expirience of history has shown us that the right to free speech is not absolute. But if to many exceptions are made the rule (the freedom) becomes meaningless. In this case the purpose of the Turkish rallies was to persuade Turkish voters to vote for a new consitution in Turkey. It was complete horseshit to try to sabotage that campaign. It made Europeans look like complete hypocrites.
OK one other point of hot dispute right now between to two parties was the EU Supreme Court ruling that allows businesses to ban Islamic headscarves in the work place. Turkish criticim is not completely unreasonable but it is wrong. Such a ban can only be put in place when all religous symbols are prohibited in the work place. Now again this is a attack on free speech. The issue is more complicated though by the location of this bann. The location of the bann makes it a work place issue. Currently workplaces are for the most part under the control of capitalists in France and in Europe. But Uniions have a lot of power in Europe and therefore a lot more say in how things get done. Furthermore if we had real sociaiist governments including Parecon in Europe this headscarf issue would still be a problem. Furthermore if it were not the headscarf it would be the Burqua. I myself draw the line of tolerance up to the Burqua but hey if others would draw it somewhere else all I can say is that where to draw the line of dress codes is an art not a science.
We should not be surprised that this headscarf thing is a problem in secular europe as Islam is seen by many and it really is to boot a mysoginist religion. But most interpritations of Islam are by no means barbaric. Clearly neither the Bible or the Quran or the US Constitution are gifts from a God. The ultimate question, one that I do not yet have an answer for is, are imperfect religions, or philosophies, or constitutions for that matter better than none at all. Even if we try to answer the question on a case by case basis it is not easy to answer.

I have to write a reevalutation of my comments on the headscarf at work question. There is another angle to look at it from that would make this issue totally come down in favor of those who would wish to wear a headscarf at work. The angle is to conside a headscarf not a item of religous identification but of CULTURAL indetification. A person could say that i am not wearing a headscarf to proclaim my Islamic identity but my Turkish or Arab identity. Now the courts in Europe would never DARE attack cultural proclimations because then that would lead to the outlawing of Catalan, Basque, Sorbian, Bavarian, and every other cultural minority groups clothing ideosynracies. The policy of oppressing European minority groups would have no suppport in Europe. So the thing is that expressing cultural identity of groups from outside of Europe will rub a lot of people the wrong way. Yet Europe can not allow what ever it is to be European, or German, or French, or Italian, or Polish to be an unchanging concept. I hope that mysogny never again becomes a bedrock European characteristic. But then I do not wish to dictate how future generations should live, only to advise them.
Furthermore one must consider that although Islam is an imperfect and mysoginistic religion it is a religion that is interpreted by people who are not all mysoginistic. There was a debatte on TV recently in which about 6 or 8 people from different viewpoints particpated. One was an Iranian woman, one was a Turkish woman. The Iranian woman said in that her cultural experience Islam is used to hold woman to a much higher moral standard than men. That is an assertion that I have heard reported a million times or more from Iranians that I have met. Yet the Turkish woman said that her brother was held to exactly the same moral standards that she was held to. So in her expierence Islam is a religion of moral discipline it is not a mysoginstic religion. Although she was aware that in many places Islam is used to treat women differently she thinks that by not wearing a headscarf she is then allowing the mysoginist Muslims to claim this symbol for their own use. Sadly I think that it is too late for this young intellegent and idealistic Turkish girl to prevent that from happening. The headscarf is seen by Europeans as a symbol of female oppression that would bring the world back 800 years or more. I myself see it as a cultural symbol that supports a return to the world of the 1950s. A return to the world of the 1950s is to far back for me as well. I do not want to go back any further than the 1970s. And I do not want to remain in the 1970s I just want to retrace our steps back to the 1970s to start all over again to move forward. There are lots and lots of people everywhere though who would love to return the world to the 1950s and stay there for ever. It is good for us on the left that these people in Turkey and Europe and the USA do not agree on much of anything else.
Down with Allah Up with God!!!!
Up with Allah down with the Pope and the Shia!!!
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Ok no may notice this but me. I read something just now that was very interesting but I did not read much about it since it annoyed me. Spiegel Magazine recently reported that the Turkish Government aksed for help from the Germans in identifying Gülen supporters in Germany. The Germany government offered support but it turns out that the German foreign intellegence service the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) passed on false information to the Turks. The reason that this whole report annoys is that the Turks should have never asked for German help in the first place. Then once it was asked the Germans should have said that this in an internal Turkish matter and we are not going to take sides, except for possibly granting political asylum to Gülen supporters beuse they clearly have a reason to fear persecution in Turkey. Yes it is true that such persecution might be justified. So it really places Germany in an akward position of being forced to take sides concerning those applying for asylum. That is the pits.

OK another year has passed since I made comments here about Turkey. One change has occured in my assement of what happened in Turkey in the summer of 2016. My initial assessment was that the USA had attempted to overthrow Erdogan because they found out that he was betraying the USA over an issue that was to important for the USA to accept.
In addition to that the coup failed because Erdogan was tipped off a head of time either by a Turk in the military who betrayed the coup plotters, or by an American in the military who betrayed to coup plotters, or by the Russians. I still think that this assessment might be correct. But since then i have become open to the possiblity that this coup was designed by the US leadership from the get go to fail. The purpose of this failed coup along with the dispute Egypt and S.A. reportedly have with Qatar could all be smoke and mirrors designed to create the impression that Erdogan is something other than a puppet of the leadership of the UKSA. That means that Erdogan would have been kept abrest of the coup plotting from the very beginning. These suspicions surfaced in my thinking because to much effort was put in to making it look like the USA was behind the coup attempt. Then with Qatar calling on Turkish forces to help forstall a Saudi Arabian invasion of Qatar which hosts a large US military I see a patern of deception to make Erdogan more influential and important than he really is.
I would like for my suspicions to actually be wrong but I think that Russia and Iran should proceed on the basis that these suspicions are correct. Not that they will ever hear about them.
And who knows maybe they had come to this conclusion long before I did. Or, maybe they have some additional pieces to the puzzle that exonorate Erdogan.